Will Sanders’ democratic socialism play in Kansas and Missouri? Moderates are leery
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, an eight-term incumbent who won his last race by more than 26 percentage points, is likely to win re-election no matter who is at the top of the Democratic party ticket in November.
But as the March 10 Missouri primary approaches, the Kansas City congressman and other Democratic Party elders are increasingly alarmed at the rise of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, as the party’s presidential frontrunner.
Cleaver thinks Democrats will suffer catastrophic losses if the race becomes a referendum on socialism rather than on President Donald Trump, sinking the party’s chances of regaining seats in the Missouri General Assembly and threatening its majority in the U.S. House.
“I don’t know if he can explain—and I don’t know if I will— the difference between a communist and a socialist. And when you have to get into that, you lose already,” said Cleaver, D-Missouri, an early endorser and campaign surrogate for Vice President Joe Biden.
Sanders’ rise at the national level comes as moderate Democrats in Kansas and Missouri look to hold onto seats flipped in 2018 and compete in statewide races where they’ll need to appeal to moderate Republican voters.
“I don’t think he’s going to play well in the Midwest. That’s just the way it is. He’s not going to play well in my district, particularly in my rural area,” Cleaver said.
But Cleaver doesn’t speak for the entire party in Missouri. Some Democrats are excited by the prospect of a nominee who promises major change rather than incremental goals and who vows to turn out first-time voters.
“Bernie Sanders is the only candidate who is trying to work for working people, no matter your ethnicity, no matter your background, no matter your income,” said Missouri state Rep. Rasheen Aldridge, D-St. Louis.
Aldridge disputed the notion that Sanders will be a drag on Missouri Democrats. He said Sanders’ commitment to a living wage and universal health care appeals to a broad spectrum of voters who will show up at the polls in November if he’s the nominee.
“The status quo is that only the elites get to be at the table,” Aldridge said. “Bernie is saying everyone gets to be at the table. He is speaking to people who are feeling disenfranchised, and that’s how we win.”
Cleaver’s prognostications of doom came after Sanders narrowly won the most votes in Iowa and New Hampshire.
After a double-digit victory in Nevada, Sanders, who has spent his career as an independent, has an opportunity to cement the Democratic nomination. In a ten-day span, beginning with South Carolina on Saturday, 21 states, including Missouri, will hold primaries and caucuses.
Election forecasting site FiveThirtyEight gave Sanders a 3-in-10 chance of winning the nomination as of Thursday afternoon. Biden is the second most likely nominee at 1-in-6, according to the site’s prediction model.
Biden will need to win convincingly in South Carolina and perform well through the string of March primaries to remain competitive with Sanders. A brokered convention remains a real possibility if none of the candidates achieve an outright majority of delegates.
Denmark vs. Cuba
Republicans have called Democratic candidates “socialist” since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal programs, such as Social Security, were decried as radical before they became untouchable entitlements.
Ahead of his first presidential run, Sanders called on Democrats in a 2015 speech to “take up the unfinished business of the New Deal and carry it to completion,” positioning himself as a candidate who would take up FDR’s mantle.
But Sanders would be the party’s first nominee to actually embrace the label of “socialist.”
The term has been used to describe a range of political movements and regimes, including both totalitarian states and democracies where some portion of the economy is publicly owned.
Sanders’ self-definition as a democratic socialist aligns him with the main opposition parties in two of Europe’s biggest democracies: the Socialist Party of France and the United Kingdom’s Labour Party.
The country he typically points to as a model is Denmark, which has an economic system that mixes elements of capitalism and socialism.
But Sanders’ critics in the Democratic Party fear that many American voters will associate the term with Cold War enemies, the Soviet Union and Cuba. Sanders traveled to both countries in the 1980s, including a 10-day honeymoon trip to the Soviet Union in 1988.
He hasn’t helped allay these fears as he’s refused to walk back praise of Cuba’s literacy program, setting off a firestorm in Florida, the swing state where many Cuban refugees settled after the country’s communist revolution in the 1950s.
When former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg invoked the specter of communism at a February debate, Sanders called it a cheap shot and tried to place democratic socialism in context.
“Let’s talk about what goes on in countries like Denmark,” Sanders said. “Where they have a much higher quality of life in many respects than we do. What are we talking about? We are living in many ways in a socialist society right now. Problem is, as Dr. Martin Luther King reminded us, we have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor.”
Down-ballot impact
Early polls show Sanders ahead of Trump nationally and in key battleground states. But Patrick Miller, a political scientist at the University of Kansas who studies polling, cautioned that this data doesn’t reflect the onslaught of negative ads and rallies in which Trump will portray Sanders as a radical.
Miller said Sanders poses a risk for freshman Democrats in suburban districts that flipped from Republican hands last election.
“They don’t want to run on the same ticket as a guy who is on video defending Soviet bread lines,” he said.
Rep. Sharice Davids, the freshman Kansas Democrat who represents a GOP-leaning district, downplayed the impact that the presidential race would have on her re-election. She did so without referring directly to Sanders, who campaigned for one of her primary opponents in 2018.
“I’m confident that my record of working on the issues that matter most to Kansans will earn me a second term, regardless of who is at the top of the ticket,” Davids said in a statement, which pointed to her support for lowering the cost of prescription drugs and passing a new trade deal with Mexico and Canada.
State Sen. Barbara Bollier, a Mission Hills Democrat running for U.S. Senate, said she can’t control who the party will nominate for president but she’s prepared to be a moderating voice regardless of which party controls the White House next year.
“One of the things I will say is that I am a voice of reason. No matter who the president is, I will stand up and do what’s right for our state,” said Bollier, a former Republican who switched parties last year.
Both Bollier and Davids oppose Sanders’ signature Medicare for All proposal, which would replace private insurance with a federally-funded, single-payer system.
Kansas hasn’t gone for a Democrat in a presidential race since 1964. The state isn’t likely to be hotly contested in 2020, but Republican candidates are already working to tie Bollier and Davids to Sanders.
Rep. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, a candidate for U.S. Senate, warned at a campaign event this week that Bollier “would be forever indebted to the tens of millions of dollars the socialist Democrats would pour into this general election if we send a vulnerable GOP candidate to the general election.”
Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, another Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, has a long history of calling political adversaries socialist or communist, a term he’s even used to describe the League of Women Voters.
Kobach called Sanders “very honest and upfront” about what he stands for, claiming that other Democratic candidates have tried to camouflage their views.
“I think having Sanders at the head of the ticket helps Republicans across the country because it makes the socialist nature of the Democrat agenda quite clear,” Kobach said.
‘People like change’
However, Sen. Pat Roberts, the retiring Republican whose seat Kobach and Marshall are seeking, said Republicans should not underestimate Sanders’ appeal in a general election or assume that his nomination will sink Bollier in the Senate race.
“Anybody that underestimates Bernie Sanders, I think, is on dangerous ground. He has a very big organization. They’re very excited. It’s part of a movement,” Roberts said.
“Too many Republicans just say, ‘socialism,’ and they just think, ‘Boom.’ I think he could be a very serious campaign… He’s a populist. And people like populists. People like change,” Roberts said.
Former Kansas Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said as federal candidates Bollier and Davids can expect to face questions about the presidential race, but she said that voters would judge both women separately from the presidential nominee.
Sebelius, who served as President Barack Obama’s secretary of Health and Human Services, has offered advice on health policy to Biden, Bloomberg and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
“Any one of the candidates who has been on the stage since the beginning would be infinitely more palatable than Trump,” said Sebelius, who has yet to make an endorsement ahead of Kansas’ May 2 primary.
Down-ballot Democrats in Missouri are also downplaying concerns about a potential Sanders nomination.
State Sen. Jill Schupp, a Democrat challenging Rep. Ann Wagner in the St. Louis suburbs, did not directly mention Sanders when asked about his potential impact on her campaign, saying she was focused on “the issues facing the people of this district, including making health care more affordable, keeping our kids safe in schools, and building an economy that works for everyone.”
Missouri state Rep. Deb Lavender, a Kirkwood Democrat hoping to unseat incumbent Republican state Sen. Andrew Koenig in one of the most hotly contested legislative races in the state, said she knows Republicans will try to throw around the “socialist” label at every Democrat if Sanders is the nominee.
But she doesn’t believe it will work in races like hers.
“People know who we are,” she said. “We’ve been out in these districts for years. It’s going to be hard to characterize us as socialists when people know the work we’ve done in Jefferson City. That will carry beyond the politicalization of the national election.”
Jason Hancock reported from Jefferson City. The Wichita Eagle’s Jonathan Shorman contributed to this report from Topeka.
This story was originally published February 28, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
